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So, it seems pretty similar to an adult brass dragon (CR11).

Of course, dragons are over-powered for their CR.

I think the main problem is putting the foe in it’s perfect environment and the weird -4 (which in the rules only applies to its creator).

They did this is RotRL: a tough foe made crazy by the tough environment.

An adult brass has a DC 20 frightful aura; nobody in the party has a -4 to resist that. The Misery Siktempora's abilities are DC 22 and the people who took the Time Lost campaign trait have a -4 vs her abilities from jump. The irony here is that Time Lost can make the GM reroll 2/book, but this isn't a GM roll you're dealing with, but a saving throw. Anyone failing a save is now subject to it's sneak attacks and has a -4 to saves vs it's abilities (which, if they fail, heals it for 5). Unlike the brass, the Misery Siktempora is constantly spamming those DC 22 Will saves. Anyone failing the brass' frightful presence can be recovered with a 1st level spell: Remove Fear.

The dragon has sleep breath at DC 22: it's not spammable, and a companion that passes the save can wake a sleeping companion as a standard action. (Not to mention that a brass that puts the whole party to sleep somehow isn't going to kill them unless they've done a lot to convine it there's no other option.) Nobody can help you with Misery Siktempora's spammable ability if you fail the save, and the DC now jumps to 26 for you. Not to mention the sneak attack dice it gets against you for failing.

Misery Siktempora lacks the dragon's bad touch AC. The Misery Siktempora has fast healing 10. The Misery Siktempora has Evasion. The Misery Siktempora is immune to mind-affecting. The brass doesn't have quickened Vanish 3/day. The Misery Siktempora's Ref and Will saves are better than the dragon's. The dragon has more attacks, but doesn't have 4d6 sneak attack that works regardless if the opponent is flat-footed or flanked. The dragon never has a standard action Whirlwind.

To paraphrase a famous line, these creatures aren't only not in the same ballpark, they're not even in the same sport.

Add to that that the Misery Siktempora, unlike Xanesha for example, is not the end fight in the dungeon; you've got more fighting to do before you're done for the day in Return.

It just highlights the poor publication process Paizo uses. It's really not a burden to get 5 people to sit for 15 minutes and run through an encounter to see how a new creature's abilities snowball the party unfairly.

Lest I misremember, you meet one at level ten. It should be fine, even if the creature is a bit too good. Pathfinder AP's normally include a few difficult encounters, it keeps the players honest.

I mean we lived, but only just barely. My point isn't that Paizo's encounter design is incredibly uneven, that's a given.

Lamia Matriarchs do a point of WIS drain every time they hit, and have mind-affecting effects at the same level. So if she hits you twice (which will happen, in all probability) you'll have a -1 to resist her effects, not a -4. She doesn't get sneak attack dice because she hit you with an effect. She doesn't have a spammable swift-action Confusion. She doesn't get to Whirlwind as a standard action at any time. She doesn't heal when you fail a save. She doesn't have Evasion.

Misery Siktempora is nonsense that would have immediately revealed itself as such with the first playtest. That's my point. My opinion is it's irresponsible of them not to do a bare minimum playtesting before publication.

The Misery Siktempora never saw play before it was published.

It has a spammable DC 22 Will save ability attached to it's attacks that makes the target take a -4 on their d20 rolls... including Will saves vs this ability. Which heals it for 5 every time you fail the roll while under the effect. If you're under this effect, you're considered flat-footed vs it's sneak attacks.

It can confuse a character as a swift action.

Every character who has the Time Lost campaign trait takes a -4 vs it's abilities.

It has Evasion.

It can Whirlwind. It has 15' reach. It's in an enclosed space the PCs drop down into (at least when we encountered it). It has the aforementioned DC 22 Will save ability attached to it's melee attack against the entire party with that Whirlwind. It's almost certainly sneak attacking everyone with the Whirlwind.

Nobody ever playtested a combat against this creature before the book was published. I strongly doubt anyone with any Pathfinder mastery wrote it.

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but this is the #1 result when searching Google for "pathfinder archer build" and want to toss my build in here for the consideration of future archer players.

I went for a multiclass build that puts out stupid amounts of damage while having a lot of skill points and some spell casting. It adds WISmod to initiative, AC, attack and damage with the longbow ≤30'. If you took the Conversion Inquisition, you'd add WISmod instead of CHAmod to Bluff, Diplomacy and Intimidate rolls as well.

Zen Archer Monk 3 / Sanctified Slayer Cloaked Wolf Inquisitor 2 / Evangelist (Inquisitor, Erastil) 10 / Prowler at the World's End Bloodrager 1
After Tengu racials 12/14/12/12/19/7

I took the levels in the order listed above. I'd most likely continue with Inquisitor after level 16.

1: Point-Blank Shot, Monk 1: Precise Shot, Zen Archer 1: Perfect Strike, Monk 1: Improved Unarmed Strike
2: Monk 2: Combat Reflexes, Zen Archer 2: Weapon Focus (longbow)
3: Deadly Aim, Zen Archer 3: Point Blank Master (longbow)
4:
5: Deific Obedience (Erastil)
6:
7: Rapid Shot, Cloaked Wolf 3: Quick Draw
8:
9: Manyshot
10: Cloaked Wolf 6: Dodge
11: Snap Shot
12: Sanctified Slayer 8: Combat Trick (Improved Snap Shot)
13: Clustered Shots, Cloaked Wolf 9: Mobility
14:
15: Combat Patrol
16:

In most campaigns, you wouldn't use Combat Patrol much, so you could replace Dodge / Mobility with Improved Initiative / Alertness and Combat Patrol with Improved Critical.

My unbuffed full attack at level 16 puts out 5 arrows: +42/+42/+37/+32 for 1d8+36 (+3d6 Sneak Attack, if applicable)

The adventure literally tells the GM to make NPC's come and talk to you about bringing in the other quests. So I really don't know.

Granted the book is written in a way where players may go to the Hospice early and end up in over their heads, but if your GM saw your struggling to find clues they probably should have seeded one of the next quests via an overheard rumour or NPC approaching you.

Pretty sure we did all the quests. First was the sewers, then I think the sunken ship then the noble's house.

My players attacked Arkminos and were getting their asses kicked till they came to their senses and paid the nosferatu to leave town.

My Knowledge roll was really good, so the GM told me, "This looks like a powerful Nosferatu with class levels. You're sure he could kick your asses easily."

If you've only done 2 missions (ship and party house), then you'll be very short on XP, and (as I've commented in GM threads), utterly shafted in terms of end result of the plague.

We did the sewers first, then the sunken ship (iirc) then the noble's house. Someone mentioned that the AP is Fast XP track and that explains the WBL and CR, as we've been using Medium. Our GM has corrected this and asked us to go ahead and level up to 6th, which puts us ~3k from 7th.

I have four questions for you (which are kind of important):

1) How many people are in your party? If you have a large party, you'll either lag behind the expected level track (which sort-of balances itself out) or the GM will have needed to adjust encounters to make them harder and boost XP.

2) How fast have you guys been running through things? The adventure has no timeline, but it has many missions which only make sense after a certain amount of time has passed - which is a serious problem with proactive/impatient parties who don't want to "sit back and wait", especially if the GM doesn't concoct distractions.

3) Have you met Andaisin? If so, how did that go?

4) Does your party have someone with the Brew Potion feat, or a...

1. We've got 4 in the party

2. We've basically moved from lead to lead as they are presented. We went to the Hospice only after we'd explored all other options because we didn't really think we'd find what we found there. We really thought it would be a place to Diplo some npcs for information at best.

3. I don't know that name. That doesn't mean we haven't met them; I just have a s&%# memory for fantasy names.

4. Nobody has Brew Potion in the party; we're playing by Society rules, so no crafting. I play an initiative Wizard, while the rest of the party consists of a Feather domain Cleric and his gorilla, a Polearm Master Fighter, and a multiclass Empiricist Investigator / Kensai Magus.

We literally exhausted all other leads we found before going to the Hospice. we went to the party house, obviously, and the sunken ship. There might've been more that we did, but I'm not recalling.w

Even 7th level wouldn't make a lot of sense because there are several CR3-4 encounters in there. I just don't understand this place at all.

Our group is at a loss over the Hospice, and suspect we missed something(s) important somewhere. I'm a player in this CCT anniversary edition game, so please try not to spoil anything for me if you can avoid it.

We had our first session in the Hospice, which I think is book 2; plague doctors, Gray Maidens, the reveal of where the disease is coming from, etc.

1) How does Paizo expect you to deal with the Hospice? It's full of people the Queen has decreed as legal authorities, higher even than the Guard (who we're essentially deputized by). So we're walking into a police station, as upholders of the law and keepers of the peace; they profess to know nothing about the missing guy we're trying to find, and the head doctor, our GM revealed after the fact, has a high Bluff and our Cleric rolled poorly on Sense Motive. So we're frustrated, but we're working for the Guard; if we're accused of murdering legal authorities over baseless suspicions, that's the end of the AP. Our GM had to stop us from walking out the front door by asking us to do a Heal check on what the plague doctors were doing (thankfully our Cleric has a good Heal check). He had to hand it to us, because the fiction in no way I can see supported doing what the AP demands of the party. How the everloving hell does Paizo expect the party to attack these people? How did this not get addressed in the second printing? It reminds me of the jail encounter in book 2-ish of Hell's Rebels where you're supposed to Bluff past an Inquisitor with 2 character levels on you. BAD encounter design to say the absolute least, and it gets a pass in the reprinting? How? Why?

2) What is with the CR rollercoaster in here? We're level 5. We only just hit level 5 before coming in the front door of the Hospice. We had a few doctor / Maiden / Uragothan encounters that made sense CR-wise but then there's that daemon, which we closed the door on; the GM had it kill cultists and not pursue. We negotiated with (bribed) the nosferatu for our target's release then headed for the head doc's office for evidence to cover our asses, but didn't get out before the session ended. In last night's post-session discussion the GM asked if we'd hit level 6 yet and we said no, we're still ~3000 away, why? And by the way wtf is with that daemon and the nosferatu? Our GM said he didn't get what was going on here as encounters were CR3-4 then CR7-9. CR8 is supposed to be an epic encounter, and there are several of them in there, let alone the CR9s that are supposed to be a TPK for a 5th level party. I think there must be something wrong, as we're slightly over wealth by level in gear, with cash and loot to sell that put us way over WBL and that is not at all par for the Paizo AP course. Are we missing something?

tl;dr: Is the Hospice totally f~@$ed from an encounter/fiction standpoint or did our group just miss some things that make it make sense?

Canny Defence (Magus, ACF Kensai 1) Intelligence to Ac while unarmored addition to dex, max 1 pr class level

Should be:

Canny Defence (Magus, ACF Kensai 1) Intelligence to AC when a kensai is wielding his chosen weapon in addition to dex, max 1 pr class level

Thanks for the reply, and sorry to take so long getting back to you; work got in the way of working on the spreadsheet.

I went ahead and added a Leadership tab to the sheet based on your (excellent) suggestion. Thanks for all the new entries.

Found some errors:

miss chance: swirling smoke tattoo -- where is this?

Blood of Shadows

resistance: shad'gorum nugget -- listed twice: should be neck slot

The item says it's often used as a mace head or greatsword counterweight. If used that way, it'd have no slot, that's why I have it in there twice.

acrobatics: ring of unquenchable passions -- ring slot

Fixed. Thanks.

disguise: mundane robe -- where is this?

It showed up in Hero Lab when I was searching for bonuses, but it's not tagged with its book as everything outside CRB is. Neither pfsrd or aon seem to know anything about it, sorry.

disguise: ring of chameleon power -- competence bonus

I have it as competence under Stealth, but its Disguise bonus comes from Disguise Self, and that grants an untyped bonus.

spellcraft: armillary amulet -- missing

Nice. Hero Lab doesn't have this, for some reason. Thanks.

While you find the delta price convenient for comparison of the upgrade cost, it makes the pricing column fail to properly sort, since you need to have the N-1 item to get the N item. Perhaps the delta should be a separate column.

You know, I totally see what you're saying, but I think I like it like this.

To me, this is a tool to find the best bang for your buck when trying to upgrade stats, and doing prices this way makes it obvious that for the cost of upgrading your armor to +3, you could get an insight or luck bonus to AC instead of just an armor bonus.

I do see your point, and the inconsistency of it has bugged me for a while, believe it or not. It's possible I'll make this change in the future, but right now, I'm focusing on combing through all the other sources of bonuses (races, spells, mundane gear, etc.).

With all the skills having the same set of ioun stones, it might be better to treat the skills as a single page with additional columns for what skill is modified.

Yeah, it'd been simpler for me to set it up that way, but it'd be more work now to condense them all into one tab than to leave it. I'd had separate tabs for Crafts, Professions, Performances, and Knowledges, and it took me some time to concatenate those into one tab each. Besides, it's nice for people to be able to go to the tab for the skill they're interested in (at least I think it is, maybe it'd be more usable with fewer tabs).

I took some time in between gigs to create a spreadsheet of magic items organized by value buffed, with their cost, the the type and value of the buff.

Notes:

In all but 3-5 cases, I discarded items that only granted a permanent bonus in some situations. The goal was to have a list of items that granted bonuses to any character in any situation the roll/value it grants a bonus to could be used. There are a lot of items that grant pretty sweet bonuses that characters have to be of a specific build to use, are only usable in specific applications, or specific situations. They're not on this spreadsheet. If that seems dumb to you, copy the sheet, and add in the stuff I passed over.

The AC and Saves sheets are weird with price, as I entered prices based on the cost to upgrade the base item, instead of its total cost. The reason is that the spreadsheet started as a simple reference to look at the most cost-effective way to upgrade values as a character levels, and then turned into something more comprehensive. If that is bad-wrong for you, just copy it to your Drive and adjust it.

I also discriminated against buffs that were of a limited duration. Some things, like Fly Speed, you have to accept a limited duration, but I erred on the side of discarding temporary buffs for everything I could.

If you see an error (and I know I must have made some, because this was uninteresting work that took longer than I'd thought) post here and I'll fix it.

I can't seem to find any reference to the level the characters will be at the end of the AP. I'd like to know if only to plan out my build. Is there anything out there clearing this up?

A crusader cleric has the same BaB, combat feats, and can cast more spells per day and can cast 9th level spells. They even get a domain.

Is what the Warpriest gets over the Crusader Cleric worth the trade?

Everyone has to answer that for themselves, but you've conveniently left out all the things a Warpriest gets that a Crusader Cleric doesn't.

Warpriest can drop enhancement bonuses and weapon properties on their weapon as a swift action. They can self-buff as a swift action that doesn't provoke. They can self heal as a swift action that doesn't provoke. Their weapon damage die advances as they level.

They're different classes. What you want to do will dictate which is better for you.

I will repeat my disclaimer of holding off final judgment until I see the finished version.

However.

Let's compare the Swashbuckler and Warpriest for a moment in terms of rough power levels.

Swashbuckler doesn't have spells, let alone a way to drop some of the best self-buffs in the game on himself as a swift action.

Swashbuckler doesn't advance their weapon damage die as they level.

Swashbuckler can't self-heal as a swift action multiple times per combat.

This is a crap comparison. Compare Warpriest to Magus and Inquisitor and things make a lot more sense.

Tels wrote:

Insain Dragoon wrote:

Cheapy wrote:

Inquisitor is the skillful counterpart to the warpriest.

Warpriest is the smashy counterpart to the inquisitor.

I dunno, I think an Inquisitor can actually be more smashy than a Warpriest considering they're both 3/4 BAB and the existence of bane/Greater Bane and Judgements.

Not to mention a spell list that was intended to be used for 6/9 casting+more/better skills.

But only for short times. The Warpriest is more 'fightery' in that his smashing goes for longer than the Inquisitor.

What does he have that goes on longer? 3/4th BAB? The Warpriest lost his "forever full BAB" man. The Blessings don't actually buff his atk/dmg in most cases.

Sacred Weapon damage dice advancement is still a thing.

I will reserve final judgement until I see the finished class, but the hit to Sacred Weapon hurts a lot. I can only hope that we will get some way to replenish our fervor like the other limited pool classes.

Right like Paladins can replenish their Lay on Hands or Clerics can replenish their Channels or Druids their Wild Shapes, or Inquisitors their Judgments ... oh right. They can't.

Fervor isn't a point-pool. I'd not hold my breath waiting for them to add a way to replenish Fervor.

Reading the Sandpoint Faithful Trait I'm wondering what it's interaction is with magical sources of fast healing and other non-cure/-channel/-LoH sources of healing like Life Link.

Sandpoint Faithful: "As a faithful adherent of Abadar, Desna, Erastil, Gozreh, Sarenrae, or Shelyn, you’ve come to the Swallowtail Festival to celebrate the consecration of Sandpoint Cathedral. You gain a silver holy symbol of your chosen deity, and so long as you worship that deity and openly wear his or her symbol, you regain +1 additional hit point every time you receive magical healing."

What would the interaction of this spell be with, say, Infernal Healing? Would the character gain 2 hp per round for a minute? Or is it intended to work more like Blessed Touch, and add 1 hp to the total healing per magical healing source?

Edit: What would the effect be for a character Linked by an Oracle or Shaman's Life Link? Would they receive six hp each round they started with 5 or more hp damage?